Does anyone know if MapInfo and QGIS will support inheritance in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database?
I would like to make use of inheritance but need to make sure the software I use will work with them.
From the book PostGIS in Action I have found the following, but am unsure if MapInfo or QGIS will be supported or not:
Inheritance works seamlessly with OpenJump, GeoServer, and MapServer. Any tool that polls the standard PostgreSQL metadata should end up treating parent tables like any other.
EDIT
I have had a look at the Paris example in Chapter 3 of PostGIS in action. I have a parent table called paris, and 3 child tables called paris_linestrings, paris_polygons and paris_points. These show up as follows on the Add PostGIS table dialog (I don't have any lines in the linestrings table yet, so that's why the paris table doesn't show lines yet) :
In MapInfo, the tables show up in the list when opening a DBMS table. I can't get them to map as I haven't set up the MapCatalog and added the relevant data to each table to allow MapInfo to show the spatial data. But I can open the tables in a browser view and see the attribute data and it seems to be correct.
All I need to do now is set up some triggers to put the correct spatial type into the correct child table when added to the parent.
Best Answer
It works seamlessly in QGIS too.